New books: short shorts, werewolves and babies

The three new Manchester books this go-round have very little in common. If they were people, you'd definitely never catch them at the same party. But they're all good in their own very different ways.

First up is Nik Perring's book of short stories. Not So Perfect (Roast), is a little thing, a pint-sized but reassuringly thick book. The stories are also on the more diminutive side of short, but pack a lot of punch into their smaller word counts. One of them, The Angel in the Car Park, first appeared in Rainy City Stories, the Manchester creative writing website I edit, so I was already a fan of Nik's writing. And, as expected, I really enjoyed the book, full of offbeat characters and stripped-down, almost anecdotal narratives that are like short stories boiled down to their most concentrated essence.

And now for something completely different:


Tom Fletcher's book The Leaping (Quercus). It starts out among a gang of friends who share a house in Manchester and work at a mind-numbing call centre, living out their post-uni lives in scenes that'll be very familiar to many of the readers of this blog. Then the action moves up to The Lakes, and that's when things get very weird indeed. Yes, this is a werewolf novel, and a very good one too. It scared the bejeezus out of me, probably because Fletcher never resorts to schlocky horror gimmicks but approaches the material in a new way. It's hard to explain, but if my experience is anything to go by the book unravels into your head like some kind of psychedelic trip. It gets under your skin and creates an altered reality, a real sense of otherness and a way of life that is utterly alien and completely convincing.

Sheesh, I'm getting scared just remembering reading that book. So let's move swiftly from freaky psychedelic werewolves to babies. Yes, babies. Manchester babies, to be more specific, as the third book I want to recommend is the new edition of Babies in the City, Manchester's own where-to-go-and-what-to-do guide for Mancunian childwranglers. Their first book has been indispensable since my daughter's arrival a couple of years ago, and the revised edition has thoughtfully added in more options that will appeal to older kids.



It's all here: obscure-but-cool museums on the fringes of Greater Manchester, parks and walks, indoor play areas, classes, kid-friendly eats in the city centre, baby-friendly movie screenings... the list goes on. Only occasionally do I disagree with the reviews of the writers, and mainly because I think I'm a lot more picky about food than they are (yes, Heaton Park cafe, I'm looking at you.) But that's really my only small gripe. If you know someone with a new baby, this is an ideal present.

Three new books from Manchester

I recently read Len Grant's Billy and Rolonde. It follows three socially excluded people - a junkie, an asylum seeker from Zimbabwe and a homeless alcoholic in their daily lives through a Manchester most of the people reading this probably wouldn't recognise. It was certainly new to me.

Both writing and photography are simple and direct, letting the people speak for themselves. The author is appealingly open about the setbacks he has throughout the project and the way that his relationship with the subjects changes over time as, inevitably, he becomes personally involved with them. Rather than trying to become invisible, he lets us see him engaged in the work of trying to tell these stories. This tactic can easily backfire, but here it works.

It's hard not to like Len Grant as a narrator, he seems honest and rarely gets preachy - facts and statistics are offered in an almost offhand manner, when they come up in the story, and are all the more powerful without the usual window dressing. And it's hard not to like each of his subjects, regular people in difficult situations who have done a brave and generous thing by allowing him, and us, this degree of access into their lives.

The book itself is a beautiful thing, designed by Alan Ward at Axis in Chorlton and released by Cornerhouse Publications. So it's an entirely Manchester-made project, which seems right. In my ideal world this would have been a prizewinning series in Manchester's local newspaper instead of a book, but there's not a snowball's chance in hell of the MEN devoting the necessary space and resources to a project like this. So it's a book, and a pretty terrific one.

I also read the two most recent chapbooks from Manchester author Nicholas Royle's Nightjar Press, which I can't recommend highly enough. Each one contains a single short story, the perfect size to shove in your bag and read on the tram. I was impressed with the solid binding and the thoughtfully-chosen covers. Chapbooks conjure up images of bent staples and inky fingers, but these are sleek beasts.

When the door closed, it was dark by Alison Moore is about a British woman who goes to an unspecified foreign country to live with a family and look after their infant. I'm not going to say any more than that, except that it is extremely creepy (in a good way), and that it might not have been such a good idea to read it while waiting for my 20-week scan in the antenatal department of Fairfield Hospital.

Black country, by Joel Lane, is a detective story in which a cop pokes about in the anonymous suburban districts of the West Midlands, investigating some weirdly troubled kids, and ends up exorcising his own buried memories. The ending raises as many questions as it answers, but satisfies all the same. Both were so good that I'll definitely be seeking out anything else Nightjar sees fit to offer us.

(Image from Billy and Rolonde courtesy of Len Grant)